The Best Science-Based DUMBBELL Biceps Exercises For Size And Shape

If you're seeking to maximize your biceps growth, then you need to ensure that you're incorporating enough dumbbell biceps exercises into your routines. And this is crucial, since dumbbell exercises not only better prevent muscle imbalances from developing in your biceps when compared to their barbell counterparts, but as you'll see in this video, they also enable us to manipulate our biceps exercises to boost growth in ways that simply aren't possible with the use of barbells. So if you'd like to boost your biceps growth by adding more dumbbell work into your routine, or on the other hand you only have access to dumbbells, then stick around as I'll go through the best dumbbell exercises you can use to target each portion of your biceps and add the size that you're after. The first exercise is the seated concentration curl and is going to be used to preferentially target the short head or inner part of the biceps. And we could do this by placing the arm slightly in front of the body during the curl, which we know biomechanically enables you to favor the short head more. And this exercise is a highly effective exercise to include in your biceps training since, as shown in the two following EMG analyses, it tends to outperform other common biceps exercises in terms of eliciting the highest biceps activation, which the researchers speculated is because by having your upper arm pressed against your leg, it better prevents you from swaying your arm as you curl when compared to other biceps exercises. And as a result, this effectively minimizes the involvement of the front delts during each rep and enables you to better isolate the biceps instead, hence the greater activation. However, in order to better target the short head of the biceps and maximize the overall effectiveness of this exercise, you'll want to implement a few key points as you perform it. First, we know, based on EMG analyses of the short head of the biceps, that its activation is maximized with combined flexion of the arm and supination of the wrist, meaning that during each rep, you'll want to be turning your wrist out to bring your pinkies up towards the ceiling as much as possible in order to fully activate the short head. But to take this even one step further, you can modify your grip by moving your hands such that when your palms are up, it grips on the outer part of the dumbbell rather than in the middle. This will now shift more of the weight into the pinkus of your hand, which then increases the degree of active supination needed to curl and twist the wrist, therefore leading to even greater involvement of the short head and then to potentially boost growth even more. After your normal set is complete and you can no longer perform additional reps, you can continue the set by performing a few more reps with assistance from your other hand during the way up of the curl, and then slowly letting the weight down without assistance during the eccentric, as doing so has been shown to significantly boost activation of the biceps even further by enabling you to continue eccentrically working with a weight you otherwise would not be able to. Next, we're going to target the long head or outer head of the biceps using the incline Dumbbell curl, which many of you know is one of my favorite biceps exercises for a variety of reasons. First of all, we know that by placing the arm behind the body during the curl, we can now preferentially target the long head of the biceps due to its anatomy. What's more though, is that as shown in this graph from a paper from the journal Sports Science and Medicine, the incline dumbbell curl is unique strength curve such that it elicits a fairly high neuromuscular activation of the biceps throughout each phase of the curl, as opposed to just the beginning or just the end, for example, which is the case with many other common biceps exercises, leading the researchers and myself to highly recommend the incline dumbbell curl to maximize biceps growth. However, as we saw with the concentration curl, its effectiveness depends on how you perform the exercise and some key points you'll want to remember as you perform it are to keep your elbow pinned and locked in place to minimize any front delt involvement. A few degrees of movement is fine, but it should not be excessive to the point where the delts begin to take over. You also don't want to cheat by rolling the shoulders forward, as this reduces the range of motion that you put the biceps through and can start to get the traps involved as well. Instead, keep your shoulder blades pinned back as you perform each rep and maintain this even as you begin to fatigue. Doing so will minimize the tension placed on unwanted muscle groups and instead maximize the growth of the biceps. Lastly, we're going to target the brachialis, which is not only responsible for some of the mass of the outer arm, but it also anatomically pushes up the biceps to create the illusion of a wider and thicker appearing arm. To effectively target this muscle, we'll want to play around with our grip by incorporating hammer curls. This is because due to the biceps anatomy, as the degree of pronation increases and the biceps tendon winds more and more around the radius, the potential for maximal force development decreases and the brachialis now takes over instead. So by gripping the dumbbell with a more pronated grip as if we were holding the hammer, we can now in a wrist friendly way, effectively shift some of the tension away from the biceps and onto the brachialis when we curl. However, to emphasize the brachialis even further with this exercise we can implement the findings of a 2001 paper from the American College of Sports Medicine which, as shown in the following graph, found that if you slow down the eccentric portion of the curl, you're able to further decrease the involvement of the biceps and instead significantly increase that of the brachialis even more as a result, which can be easily implemented into the hammer curl by Simply implementing a 3 to 5 second sleep slow eccentric during the weight down of each rep as this will enable you to isolate the brachialis that much more. So here's a quick summary of the dumbbell exercises I went through, targeting each region of the biceps with the recommended sets and reps. Feel free to do this as a workout on its own, or you can split it up and add one or two of the exercises to your existing workouts instead. We also suggest playing around with the order of the biceps exercises since we know that lifters experience experience greater gains for exercises that are done early on in their workout. So if your long head or outer bicep for example, is noticeably lagging behind compared to your short head or inner bicep, then you want to perform the incline dumbbell curls first in your workout in order to prioritize the long head's development. This way you'll be able to see more balanced biceps growth in the long run.

I hope you guys enjoyed the video, but just remember, like I've said in the past, if you want to build muscle and stop wasting your time in the gym, then it's absolutely vit that you not only choose the right exercises, but you need to perform these exercises in a way that's been proven to be most effective. And that's exactly why within my Built with Science programs, we've not only carefully selected each and every exercise included in your step by step routines, but we've also taken the time to create in depth tutorials for each exercise such that you know exactly how to perform them optimally in order to build muscle as fast as possible. To join today, simply head on over to builtwithscience.com and take the analysis quiz to determine what program will best help you build the muscle that you're after. Anyways, as always, please show your support by giving the video a like leaving a comment down below as to what you'd like to see me cover next, subscribing to the channel and turning on notifications for the channel as well as this all really does help me out. Thank you so much everyone for the continued support. I really do appreciate it and I'll see you next time. It.